From the course: Migrating to Windows 10

Benefits of cloud-based identities - Windows Tutorial

From the course: Migrating to Windows 10

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Benefits of cloud-based identities

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- [Instructor] Allowing your users to access their documents, email, and business services from anywhere is a paradigm shift especially when compared to traditional working, even if you have roaming user profiles in place. This can be achieved simply by providing them with a cloud-based identity. Let's take a look at the other benefits that are offered by using cloud-based identities. Cloud-based accounts offer several benefits. These include that they're centrally managed from an online portal, they can provide a simpler infrastructure, they're accessible anywhere with an Internet connection, and they're more secure. Let's take a look. Using cloud-based accounts allows organizations to centrally manage identity services from a single web portal. This should reduce the costs of managing users both in terms of ease for administrators and in terms of service and licensing costs. Azure Active Directory which provides the centrally managed identity services comes in four editions: Free, Basic, Premium P1, and Premium P2. The Free tier of Azure AD is free for up to 500,000 users, but if you want to use the enhanced features such as groups, hybrid users, self-service password reset, company branding and more, you will probably need at least the Basic or Premium versions of Azure AD. When you use Azure AD, you're subscribing to identity as a service, which provides your organization with these identity and authentication requirements. Since the cloud-based accounts are managed by Microsoft on their infrastructure, this is simpler for your organization. Also, your users will use a single identity experience to access all their apps and services across their devices. And because of the global scale of the Microsoft data center network, you can be assured that your growth requirements will be met all within the single monthly subscription. We've seen that an advantage of cloud-based accounts is that they are managed and hosted in the cloud. This means that they're accessible from anywhere in the world via an Internet connection. Users can access their resources either directly from an app or from an web-based portal such as Office.com on any device, no matter where they're located, and because Azure AD is at the core of all Microsoft online services, Microsoft takes security very seriously. The data centers are strictly regulated and all identity data on their servers is encrypted both at rest using BitLocker Drive Encryption, and when in transit using TLS. Multifactor authentication is also available for both Azure AD and Microsoft 365 user accounts. Requiring two forms of authentication for the signing process ensures that user accounts are kept safe and secure whilst still keeping the login process simple.

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